See how users interact with your site, without tracking them.
A privacy-first analytics dashboard for Mac. It reads from a free, cookieless
collector that runs on your own hosting, so the visitor data goes from your site to
your Mac and not through a third-party analytics service.
Members only · Experimental · Included with the $49 annual membership
Available to download while your membership is active · macOS app for Intel and
Apple Silicon · Needs the free collector on your site
At a glance
What it shows you
First add the collector to your site, then connect it to the app with a read token, and
the app pulls your visits into a local database on your Mac. The database is kept even
if you replace the collector later.
01
Where visitors come from
Search, social, referrals and AI assistants such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, with each
visitor counted once under the source of their first visit.
02
What they do once they arrive
Each visit is shown as the path it took through your pages, from the page it started
on to any outbound link that was clicked.
03
What is broken
404 pages are listed with the page that linked to them, so you can fix the link.
See it in action
Screens from the app
Real screens from the app, showing a demo site. Select any screenshot to enlarge it.
Overview
Step 01
The Overview
Visitors, pageviews, channels, top pages, referrers, devices and countries for the
last 7, 30 or 90 days, with flagged traffic and likely scans left out unless you ask
for them.
Sessions & Journeys
Step 02
Sessions and journeys
You can search the sessions by path, or switch to Patterns to group visits that took
the same path, with the most common journeys at the top.
Broken Links
Step 03
Broken links
Broken Links lists the 404 pages the collector saw and how many times each one was
hit. The script recognises a 404 from the page title, so a not-found page whose
title doesn't say so may not show up here.
Members only · Experimental · Included with the $49 annual membership
When you want the specifics
More detail
What is included, how the two parts fit together, how visitors are counted and what
experimental means. Each heading opens to the full answer.
Everything included
macOS desktop app for Intel and Apple Silicon
Overview, Insights, Sessions & Journeys, Broken Links and Goals tabs
Connect more than one site, each with its own collector
Visits synced into a local database on your Mac, kept even if you replace a
collector
Flagged traffic (bots, scripts, missing origin) and likely scans left out by
default, with a toggle to see them
PDF report worked out the same way as the Overview, with likely scans always
left out
Backup and restore of your site connections and goals, and a trash that keeps
deleted sites and goals for 14 days
The collector is free and open source, for Cloudflare or PHP shared hosting
How the two parts fit
Add the collector
A small script and a collector that run on your own hosting. Cloudflare is the
recommended path, with a deploy button that clones the collector into your own
GitHub account and deploys it to your own Cloudflare account, so you need a
free Cloudflare account and a GitHub account for this. The PHP version is for
shared hosting, where you upload one file and an .htaccess file, set a token
and add the script to your site. Countries come from Cloudflare, so with the
PHP version they only show if your site is proxied through Cloudflare.
Connect the app
Give the app the collector's address and the read token you set on the
collector. The token is encrypted on your Mac, and backups do not include it,
so you enter it again after restoring.
Sync and read
The app pulls new visits from a collector when you open that site, and keeps
them in a local database. The dashboard, sessions and PDF report are all
worked out from that local copy, on your Mac's clock and time zone.
How visitors are counted
The collector does not use cookies, local storage or any persistent ID. It makes a
hash from the visitor's IP address, browser and language preference together with
a random salt that changes every day, and the IP address and browser details are
not stored. Because the salt changes daily, the same person on two different days
counts as two visitors, and counts may not match a tool that sets a cookie.
Sessions are visits by one visitor with no gap longer than 30 minutes. Channels
count each visitor once, under the source of their first visit in the date range,
so a visitor who came from search is not also counted under Referral, and
page-to-page navigation within your site is not counted as a source.
The collector flags visits that look like bots, scripts or requests with a missing
or mismatched origin, and the app leaves those out by default. The app also looks
for likely scans, where many visitors each hit a different page within seconds
from the same country, and leaves those out too. Both can be included with a
toggle, because some flagged visits may be real people, for example on a privacy
browser that does not send an Origin header.
What experimental means
Website Insights is an experiment that I built for my own sites and am sharing
with members. It was a quick build on an idea, so I may not continue to support it
in the way I do the apps built for specific needs. Versions you downloaded during
a paid membership period can still be used if that happens, as long as that period
was not refunded. The collector is open source and the visits are kept in the
app's local database on your Mac.
Why I built it
I mainly wanted this app because I'm mindful of tracking for user privacy, but I
also know that website owners want a simple way to see how people are interacting
with their site, to know what pages are working, what links are broken, etc., so
this is that simple type of app.
Membership and updates
Is Website Insights sold separately?
No. Website Insights is only available with the membership.
What's changed in the latest version?
Updates are included while your membership is active. You can see the full list of
changes on the
changelog page.
